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Matt Dickinson is a film-maker and writer who is best known for his award-winning novels and his documentary work for National Geographic Television, Discovery Channel and the BBC. Dickinson was one of the climbers caught in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. [1] In 2003 he was the co-writer and director of Cloud Cuckoo Land—an independent British movie. [2] [3]
He was a student at The Hemel Hempstead School up to the age of 16 and Gresham's School in Norfolk where he did his A levels. He joined the BBC in 1984, training as a researcher and production manager and working on programmes such as Wogan and Ever Decreasing Circles . Dickinson left in 1988 to pursue a freelance career as a production-director. In November 2015 Matt Dickinson visited schools across the UK to show students his achievements in his life, including to be part of the first camera crew to summit Mount Everest.
Specialising in adventure documentaries, Matt Dickinson's credits include BBC 1's Classic Adventure and several hour-long films such as Channel 4's Encounters , Equinox and ITV's Network First .
His programmes have been broadcast in more than thirty-five countries and have won awards at film festivals such as the Graz Mountain Film Festival, The Trento Mountain Film Festival and the Napa/Sonoma Film Festival.
In the pre-monsoon Everest season of 1996, amid the worst weather conditions on record, with Alan Hinkes, Britain's foremost high-altitude climber, Dickinson made a successful ascent of Mount Everest's notorious North Face, one of the most technically demanding climbs on the world's highest peak, beating hurricane-force winds and temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius. Three of the eight deaths on Everest that day were on the North Face. He was climbing further up Everest when he came across the famous 'Green Boots' he was confused why someone would have fallen asleep on the north face of Everest but it was soon to occur to him that this body was no longer alive. It was an Indian climber that was separated from the rest of his team in 1996 and was found for the first time.
He became one of the first British film-makers to film on the summit and return alive, and his film called Summit Fever has now been seen by more than twenty million people worldwide. His written account of the same expedition, The Death Zone (Random House) has been published to critical acclaim in more than fifteen countries.
Matt Dickinson's new series Mortal Chaos was commissioned by Oxford University Press in November 2010 and the first book in the series was published in January 2012. [4]
Dickinson's books include:
By Vertebrate Publishing:
Mount Everest is Earth's highest mountain above sea level, located in the Mahalangur Himal sub-range of the Himalayas. The China–Nepal border runs across its summit point. Its elevation of 8,848.86 m was most recently established in 2020 by the Chinese and Nepali authorities.
Anatoli Nikolaevich Boukreev was a Soviet and Kazakh mountaineer who made ascents of 10 of the 14 eight-thousander peaks—those above 8,000 m (26,247 ft)—without supplemental oxygen. From 1989 through 1997, he made 18 successful ascents of peaks above 8,000 m.
Sir Christian John Storey Bonington, CVO, CBE, DL is a British mountaineer.
Peter Boardman was an English mountaineer and author. He is best known for a series of bold and lightweight expeditions to the Himalayas, often in partnership with Joe Tasker, and for his contribution to mountain literature. Boardman and Tasker died on the North East Ridge of Mount Everest in 1982. The Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature was established in their memory.
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a 1997 bestselling nonfiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It details Krakauer's experience in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which eight climbers were killed and several others were stranded by a storm. Krakauer's expedition was led by guide Rob Hall. Other groups were trying to summit on the same day, including one led by Scott Fischer, whose guiding agency, Mountain Madness, was perceived as a competitor to Hall's agency, Adventure Consultants.
Alan Hinkes OBE is an English Himalayan high-altitude mountaineer from Northallerton in North Yorkshire. He is the first British mountaineer to claim all 14 Himalayan eight-thousanders, which he did on 30 May 2005.
Robert Edwin Hall was a New Zealand mountaineer. He was the head guide of a 1996 Mount Everest expedition during which he, a fellow guide, and two clients died. A best-selling account of the expedition was given in Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air, and the expedition has been dramatised in the 2015 film Everest. At the time of his death, Hall had just completed his fifth ascent to the summit of Everest, more at that time than any other non-Sherpa mountaineer.
Alison Jane Hargreaves was a British mountaineer. Her accomplishments included scaling Mount Everest alone, without supplementary oxygen or support from a Sherpa team, in 1995. She soloed all the great north faces of the Alps in a single season—a first for any climber. This feat included climbing the difficult north face of the Eiger in the Alps. Hargreaves also climbed 6,812-metre (22,349 ft) Ama Dablam in Nepal.
Leo Houlding is a British rock climber and mountaineer.
Mount Everest is the world's highest mountain, with a peak at 8,849 metres (29,031.7 ft) above sea level. It is situated in the Himalayan range of Solukhumbu district, Nepal.
The 2007 Altitude Everest expedition, led by the American climber Conrad Anker, arrived at Base Camp below the north face of Everest in May 2007 and retraced the last journey of British climber George Mallory who was lost during the 1924 British Mount Everest expedition.
Green Boots is the body of an unidentified climber that became a landmark on the main Northeast ridge route of Mount Everest. The body has not been officially identified, but is believed to be Tsewang Paljor, an Indian member of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition (ITBP) who died as part of the 1996 climbing disaster on the mountain wearing green Koflach mountaineering boots. All expeditions from the north side encountered the body curled in the limestone alcove cave at 8,500 m (27,900 ft), until it was moved by members of a Chinese expedition in 2014.
The 1996 Mount Everest disaster occurred on 10–11 May 1996 when eight climbers caught in a blizzard died on Mount Everest while attempting to descend from the summit. Over the entire season, 12 people died trying to reach the summit, making it the deadliest season on Mount Everest at the time and the third deadliest after the 23 fatalities resulting from avalanches caused by the April 2015 Nepal earthquake and the 16 fatalities of the 2014 Mount Everest avalanche. The 1996 disaster received widespread publicity and raised questions about the commercialization of Everest.
Victor Saunders is a British climber and author. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. His first book, Elusive Summits, won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1991. He became as a UIAGM/IFMGA ski and mountain guide in 1996 and joined the SNGM in 2003. Saunders first reached the summit of Mount Everest in May 2004, and went on to climb it several more times. In 2020 he became president of the Alpine Club.
Kenton Edward Cool is an English climber and mountain guide. He is one of Britain's leading alpine and high altitude climbers and has reached the summit of Mount Everest 17 times, including leading Sir Ranulph Fiennes' 2008 and 2009 Expeditions.
The 1924 British Mount Everest expedition was—after the 1922 British Mount Everest expedition—the 2nd expedition with the goal of achieving the first ascent of Mount Everest. After two summit attempts in which Edward Norton set a world altitude record of 8,572.8 metres (28,126 ft), the mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine disappeared on the third attempt. Their disappearance has given rise to the long-standing speculation of whether or not the pair might – under a narrow set of assumptions – have reached the summit. Mallory's body was found in 1999 at 8,156 metres (26,760 ft), but the resulting clues did not provide any conclusive evidence as to whether the summit was reached.
Eric Jones is a Welsh solo climber, skydiver and BASE jumper.
Michael "Mick" Burke was an English mountaineer and climbing cameraman.
The North Face is the northern side of Mount Everest. George Mallory's body was found on the North face. The North Face is a place where one author/climber noted, "a simple slip would mean death."
The 1975 British Mount Everest Southwest Face expedition was the first to successfully climb Mount Everest by ascending one of its faces. In the post-monsoon season Chris Bonington led the expedition that used rock climbing techniques to put fixed ropes up the face from the Western Cwm to just below the South Summit. A key aspect of the success of the climb was the scaling of the cliffs of the Rock Band at about 8,200 metres (27,000 ft) by Nick Estcourt and Tut Braithwaite.